Child safety seats (sometimes referred to as an infant safety seat, a child restraint system, a restraint car seat, or ambiguously as car seats) are seats designed specifically to protect children from injury or death during collisions. These seats are typically purchased and installed by consumers. Many regions require children defined by age, weight, and/or height to use a specific government-approved child safety seat, resulting is several classes of child safety seats generally referred to as baby (or infant) car seats for children up to 2 years or older, and “booster seats” for children to age 9 or 90 lbs.
All child safety seats must pass rigorous compliance testing before sale to consumers is authorized, for example, by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. One area of compliance testing involves measuring chest acceleration, and is measured by strapping a test dummy into a proposed child safety seat product, and then simulating a frontal crash at a regulated speed (e.g., 35 miles per hour). If the test dummy experiences predetermined minimum resultant chest acceleration (e.g., 60 G's or more), then the proposed child safety seat product fails testing and is not authorized for sale to the public.
Conventional methods for achieving chest acceleration compliance include the addition of shock absorbing pads to the restraint harness (safety belt) located over the chest region of the test dummy. While this approach is mechanically workable (i.e., compliance may be achievable by adding sufficient chest padding to the safety harness), it is commercially impractical for several reasons. First, because such chest padding must be manipulated by a consumer every time a child is seated into or removed from the safety seat, a significant amount of chest padding in the safety harness can substantially detract from the marketability of a child safety seat. That is, consumers are more likely to purchase a child safety seat that utilizes a harness formed with standard safety belts over a seat having a bulky padded restraint harness that is difficult to install and remove. In addition, padded restraint harnesses acts as an insulator that can cause a child to overheat, which can also detract from the marketability of a child safety seat. Moreover, because chest restraint harnesses are prominently located in in the center-front region of every child safety seat and are constantly subjected to passenger contact, the addition of bulky padding requires the use of cover materials that have a soft feel, are durable, and are attractively decorated or otherwise aesthetically pleasing, all of which significantly increase the cost of a child safety seat.
Other attempted methods for achieving chest acceleration compliance include utilizing energy-absorbing regions into the construction of the harness itself thereby permitting release or extension of the harness during a crash to absorb shocks. While these systems avoid the need for chest padding, they utilize tension-type shock absorbing elements that either provide a potentially unlimited amount of stretch, or they require a rigid member or additional strap to set an upper limit on the amount of permitted stretch. When the amount of stretch is unlimited, such tension-type shock absorbing elements permit an active child to displace the harness belts and/or partially escape the restraint harness system, thus subjecting the child to injury during a crash. In addition, unlimited tension-type resilient elements are problematic because they become weaker under stain (i.e., they become thinner when stretched), making it difficult to add flexibility without risking breakage. When a limit device is used, the limit device sets a “hard stop” at the end of the belt play that can generate a sharp increase in deceleration, causing a safety seat to fail crash testing.
What is needed is a mechanism for achieving chest acceleration compliance that avoids the problems associated with conventional methods. Specifically, what is needed is a child safety seat that is economical to produce, easy to use, and reliably meets government chest acceleration compliance testing.